Chapter One
No real archaeologist, let alone a lowly grad student like me, ever actually got to uncover a mosaic that reshapes everything she thought she knew about the past.
That, however, was exactly what had just happened to me. Maybe it didn’t change everything I had thought I knew about the past, but it changed the parts that mattered most to me. The parts about the Normans in Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The tesserae beneath my brush told a story that no textbook had ever whispered, let alone proclaimed. I had been working the site, outside Palermo, for three weeks already, cataloging every detail of what the rest of the dig team had dismissed as a servants’ house. I felt certain, based on the dimensions, that it was actually the undercroft of a Norman chapel.
I had almost given up hope when the pattern had begun to emerge. Not the interlocking geometric borders that characterized standard Sicilian-Norman work of the period, not the medallions that any first-year art history student could identify as Byzantine. Something older. Something that had no business being here at all.
I sat back on my heels and pressed my wrist against my forehead, careful not to touch my face with the brush hand. The late afternoon light slanted through the narrow window slits of the undercroft, catching the gold leaf tesserae at an angle that made them burn like small fires set into the earth. My heart was doing something undignified and unscholarly in my chest.
The central design seemed unmistakable.
Not Christ. Not the Virgin. Not any of the saints whose iconography I had spent a big part of my doctoral coursework memorizing.
A tree. Specifically, a tree whose roots descended into three distinct realms rendered in lapis and obsidian glass, whose branches would clearly spread across the top of the composition in a pattern I had seen before, not in any Sicilian context, but in illuminated manuscripts from a monastery outside Bergen that I had studied during my undergraduate thesis year.
Yggdrasil.
Here. Beneath a Norman chapel. In Sicily.
I set my brush down with extreme care, because my hands had started to shake.
The academic part of my brain, the stubborn intellectual part that had gotten me through my qualifying exams and three rejection letters from major journals before my first acceptance, had already begun to construct the argument. The Normans had come south into France, yes, but they were Norse in origin. Eleventh century. The conversion had been relatively recent. It was not, strictly speaking, impossible that some remnant of the old belief system had traveled with them, had found expression in a private space, an undercroft, a place below the official architecture of the new faith.
Not impossible. Extraordinary, certainly. Career-defining, possibly.
The other part of my brain, the part I didn’t discuss in academic papers or with my dissertation committee, was doing something else entirely. It was looking at the female figure I had only just begun to uncover at the base of the tree, her form emerging from centuries of grime and careful brushwork, and feeling a recognition that had nothing whatsoever to do with scholarship.
She was tall. Angular-featured. Her hair, rendered in silvered tesserae, fell in loose waves.
My grandmother’s pendant, the small rune-carved disc I wore always at my throat, suddenly felt warm against my skin.
I told myself it was the Sicilian heat. The day’s weather, plus confirmation bias.
Then I saw the border inscription, and confirmation bias became the least of my problems, because I couldn’t have imagined those letters if I’d tried.
The text ran along the lower edge of the composition in a band I had taken, in my initial excitement over the tree, for decorative knotwork. It wasn’t knotwork. It was language, the Latin the cosmopolitan Norman court had used alongside old French and Greek and Arabic. The words, however, weren’t written in the Roman capitals familiar to any literate Norman cleric.
The script was Younger Futhark, the Norse runes I knew only because, well, I had been a Norse myth geek in high school. They read, Filii Mercurii. Hic Incipit Via.
Latin, written in Norse runes. Not unheard of, as the church began its inexorable march through the Scandinavian lands. Unheard of here, though, in Sicily, where the Normans had long since adopted Roman writing despite their Norse heritage.
Sons of Mercury. Here the road begins.
My Latin was adequate. My Latin was, my committee would have said with the faint approval they rationed carefully, more than adequate.
And I had used it to read Tacitus. Or anyway the one book of Tacitus that mattered to me, the Germania, with its precious witness to the tribes that would migrate to Scandinavia and become the Vikings.
Including the passage in which the Roman historian had described the Germanic tribes worshipping a god he called Mercury, a god like the Romanized version of Hermes. A god of travelers and cunning and the dead… a god who was obviously not Mercury or Hermes at all, but something from a different kind of supernatural world. A colder and far less civilized one.
Odin. Tacitus had clearly described the god the Norse peoples would worship as Odin.
Sons of Mercury. Sons of Odin.
Here the road begins.
The inscription continued. I had to lean so close that my nose nearly grazed the tesserae, and then pull back, as if I were looking at a concealed 3D image. I had cleaned this section thoroughly, and the mosaic had suffered miraculously little damage. The runes remained very hard to make out, so hard that I began to think the artist had purposely concealed them in the knotwork.
Directions, along the coast southeast of Palermo. I recognized the Norman names of tiny settlements. Some had become towns that remained to this day, while others no longer existed except on our oldest maps.
Coordinates, really, of a kind. The sort of directional language that a Norman knight who had sailed from Rouen would have understood instinctively. Distances rendered in a unit I recognized as a Norman variation of the Roman mille passus. A landmark: one rock among three. A coastline: a bend toward the rising sun. A cliff described in terms that, if I was reading them correctly, could only refer to something in the limestone escarpment on Capo Zafferano, twenty-three kilometers almost directly east of where I was currently crouching in the dirt with my heart in my throat.
I stayed very still for a long moment.
Then I took out my phone.
I photographed everything. Every centimeter of the inscription. The full composition with the tree and the silver-haired woman at its roots and the border text running beneath like a secret the mosaic had been waiting nine centuries to tell someone. I worked methodically, the way I always worked, overlap between frames, multiple angles, with flash and then without. My hands had stopped shaking. That meant I had made a decision, somewhere in my body, that my mind hadn’t yet caught up to.
When I had what I needed, I put my phone away.
Then I took my trowel and, with the same care I had used to uncover it, I began to cover the mosaic back up. Loose soil first, worked gently into the gaps between tesserae. Then the larger aggregate. Then the surface layer, tamped down and textured to match the surrounding undisturbed earth. I had watched enough sites get backfilled to know how it was done. In three weeks, the supermarket’s foundation crew would arrive and pour concrete over this entire section, and the mosaic of the Filii Mercurii would sleep for another nine centuries, or forever, beneath a car park.
No one would find it.
No one except me had found it.
I told myself I had protected the mosaic. I had shielded the site from the kind of attention that would bring in authorities and journalists and rival academics and ultimately the concrete anyway, just with more paperwork. I told myself that as I smoothed the last of the surface soil with the flat of my palm, and I almost believed it.
The pendant at my throat still felt warm.
I reached the coast two hours later, just as the light had started to become golden over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sicily looked like a landscape, and a seascape, from ancient myth. I drove the dig’s battered Fiat to the nearest point the road allowed and then walked, following a goat track down through maquis scrub that smelled of wild rosemary. In one of my cargo pockets I had my phone and a small torch. In the other I had the water bottle I had remembered at the last moment to bring.
The inscription had mentioned a rock among three. To my astonishment, I found a candidate almost immediately: one part of the looming precipice that jutted further than the two by its side. I stood at its base and looked at the shoreline and saw nothing but rock and sea.
Then I looked at the rock more carefully, passing back and forth, trying to make my eyes focus on different distances to keep from being fooled by the similarity of background to foreground.
The fissure was narrow enough that I walked past it twice before I registered what I was seeing. Not a cave mouth, exactly. More like the coastline had developed an opinion about itself and decided to keep that opinion a secret. The limestone had folded in a way that presented a solid face to anyone approaching from the water and a near-invisible vertical crack to anyone approaching from the land, and only at this specific angle, with the evening light hitting the cliff face from precisely this direction, was the darkness behind the crack visible at all.
I turned sideways and pushed through.
The passage stretched about four meters. It smelled of salt and cold stone. There was something underneath those things, though, something organic that didn’t seem to fit the ocean setting. My mind fastened on the scent-impression of the inside of a chest that had held important things for a very long time.
Then that chest opened.
The cavern was enormous. That was the first thing. The limestone had opened into a space that had no business existing inside a coastal cliff, a vault thirty meters high at least, the ceiling lost in shadow, the floor descending in a series of natural terraces toward a still inner pool that caught the last of the exterior light through some crack or channel I couldn’t locate. The air was cool and felt completely dry. The acoustics were extraordinary. I could hear my own breathing echoing the way it might in a cathedral.
And in the center of the lowest terrace, resting on a cradle of ancient timber that had been reinforced, I could see now, with more recent work—that newer wood looked old, but not nine centuries old, some of it merely decades—was a ship.
A longship. A dragon ship.
I turned my torch on and walked toward it with a specific quality of attention that it seemed I was learning to bring to things that couldn’t possibly be real.
The hull looked intact. That was the second impossible thing. Clinker-built, the overlapping strakes fastened with iron rivets that had oxidized to a dark red-brown, the whole surface treated with something that had preserved the wood against the salt air with a thoroughness that no natural process could account for. Someone had maintained this at some point in the last hundred years, if perhaps not recently. Someone had come here and cared for this ship over the centuries.
The prow had the head of a serpentine creature whose open mouth faced toward the sealed cave entrance, toward the sea it had not tasted in God knew how many years—if ever. With a frown at the unlikeliness of it all, I realized that the thing must have been assembled, or reassembled, inside this cavern, since it could never have passed through the narrow opening I had just entered by.
I ran my torch along the hull and then up and across to the cavern walls, and that was when I stopped walking.
The walls were covered in images.
Floor to ceiling, from the tideline on the lower terrace to the point where the limestone curved inward toward the vault, the walls of the cavern had been carved in deep relief, with the patient and authoritative skill of people who had considered this work important enough to do properly.
I approached the nearest section and held my torch close.
The figures were large. Men and women, some of them dressed in Viking clothing. Most of them, though…
Heat surged into my cheeks as I started to make out the subject of the vast majority of the carvings.
Most of the figures were naked. Much worse, in most of the scenes…
Oh, God, I thought, my mind exaggerating only a little bit, they’re all fucking, aren’t they?
[divider]Chapter Two
Ilsa
I was a virgin. Mostly because relationships, I had thought all my adult life, were bullshit. Also because I’d been raised pretty conservatively, and thus when I looked at those walls covered with those frankly pornographic carvings, my face burned like the surface of the sun.
To my horror, though, my face wasn’t the only part of me that had begun to burn.
I made myself look at the carvings the way I would look at any artifact. Methodically. Starting at the left-hand edge of the nearest wall and moving right. That was the scholarly approach. That was what I did.
The men were enormous. That was the first thing the artists had established, with an anatomical frankness that left absolutely nothing to interpretation. The Vikings in these carvings were rendered with the kind of reverent attention to masculine proportion that I associated with the most unambiguous fertility cult imagery I had ever encountered in my coursework—and I had encountered quite a lot of it, in a purely academic capacity, without any of the physical consequences I was now experiencing.
Their bodies stood very tall, and their phalluses hung down almost to their knees when flaccid, in a scene of several warriors bathing. When erect, confronting a young woman upon her knees—as happened over and over in the carvings—the rigid Viking penises seemed to rival the members of donkeys or horses.
Cocks, a voice whispered in my head. Don’t be a prude, Ilsa. You know what to call them. These Vikings are using their huge cocks to fuck their new bed thralls.
I swallowed hard. I tried to silence that whisper.
Phalluses. Fertility imagery.
I looked at the carvings of the women, trying somehow to focus my mind in a different direction from my perception. The artists had taken extraordinary pains to make their beauty clear: high cheekbones, strong jaws, long hair flying loose or pulled by large fists. They were shown in the initial scenes struggling—arms reaching back, mouths open—but the struggle was being attended to.
That phrase, attended to, kept presenting itself to my mind as I moved the torch slowly across the carved limestone.
Attended to. These young women are having themselves attended to.
A Viking with one hand wrapped in a woman’s hair, bending her backward over what was clearly a village table, his other hand working between her thighs while her expression transformed, in the artist’s sequential rendering of a single moment, from something that had started as resistance into something else that to my distress I recognized.
I refused to consider what I recognized in that expression.
The village scenes ran in a continuous narrative band. A coastal settlement. Longships drawn up on the shore. And then the Vikings were inside, and the women of the village were… some of them were running, but the ones who had been caught were being attended to, as I kept thinking of it, in a variety of configurations that the artists had clearly considered important to document comprehensively.
One woman knelt before a seated Viking of spectacular physical dimensions, her hands bound behind her, her head guided forward with a patience that the carving somehow conveyed through the angle of the man’s wrist. Her mouth could barely accommodate the massive shaft atop which the warrior held her face, but somehow the long-dead artist had conveyed that she performed the degrading service willingly.
Another girl bent across another table, like the one I had just been looking at. A Viking stood behind her with his hands on her hips and his rigid phallus thrusting deep into her vagina. Her face—I brought the torch close and then immediately regretted it—wore an expression that was not suffering, or perhaps not only suffering… suffering along with something else that the suffering brought with it, unwelcome but nevertheless a kind of consolation.
Another scene showed a woman between two men, on her hands and knees. The warriors, too, had knelt, so that they could get their enormous manhoods into her, fore and aft. Their handsome faces looked down at where they had entered her mouth and her pussy, grave looks of satisfaction on their faces. I moved the torch away from that one faster than I had moved it away from anything else, which was how I noticed that my hand was trembling again.
Not the scholarly trembling. The other kind.
I pressed my free hand flat against my thigh and kept walking.
The longship scenes came next, and I told myself that the change in setting would help. It did not help. The rowing benches had been rendered in careful detail, and on those benches the women lay or knelt or were positioned by unhurried hands, while the ships moved across a carved sea.
The Vikings took their time enjoying their captives with their huge cocks as they sailed home. I felt certain that was what the artists had above all insisted on showing, in scene after scene: the men did not seem the slightest bit rushed. They had long straps in their hands that they obviously used to ensure their new thralls’ obedience.
The women’s faces in these scenes, as they accepted their new masters over and over in their mouths and pussies, had moved past the ambiguous expressions of the village. They showed something more settled. More undone.
I realized that my free hand was no longer flat against my thigh.
I stopped walking.
I stood in the torchlight with my hand pressed between my legs through the canvas of my cargo pants. I made myself completely still, feeling absolute horror at myself.
I moved my hand away. I made myself do it, as if I were putting down something fascinating that I had had no business picking up.
I resumed walking. The torch beam moved to the next section, which showed the homecoming. The Vikings brought their women ashore now, into Norse settlements, and the artists had shifted register slightly—the urgency of the raid scenes and the patience of the voyage replaced by something more domestic and therefore, I found, even more disturbing. Because the domesticity implied permanence. Bed thralls, I thought, my academic vocabulary clicking into place like a lock turning. The Norse institution of the bed thrall. I had read about this. I had read about it in the same careful, distant way I had read about everything I had never expected to encounter at close quarters.
Then the… the… device appeared in these homecoming scenes, and I stopped again.
I had never seen it before, or anything like it, which was notable, because I had looked at a great deal of Norse material culture in my academic career and I thought I had a reasonably complete mental catalogue. It was a frame of some kind—carved wood, by the look of the artistic rendering, with curved elements that suggested careful ergonomic design. The women were bound to it in a specific configuration, kneeling, their weight supported by padded elements at the hips and knees, their upper bodies angled forward, their wrists secured to a horizontal bar. It had the quality of purpose-built equipment. The kind of thing someone had thought about for a long time before making.
And in every scene involving this device, the Vikings were behind the women. They held their straps as if they had needed them to persuade, or to encourage, their captives.
Behind them.
Behind them with their massive warriors’ cocks inside the girls’ little bottoms.
My mouth had become utterly dry. My hand had gone between my legs again.
I hadn’t noticed. That was what frightened me most: I genuinely had not noticed until I felt the seam of my cargo pants pressing against me in a way that was not accidental, because my hips had moved, and I had let them move. I had done this in a cavern in Sicily while looking at nine-hundred-year-old pornography carved into limestone by people who might have been my ancestors. I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology, and…
I stepped back. I stepped back hard enough that my shoulder blades hit the gunwale of the longship. The cold of the wood came through my shirt, and I stood there with my torch pointed at the ceiling. My breathing had gotten audibly rough in the acoustics of the space, and I waited for my body to become mine again.
It took longer than I would have liked.
When I felt capable of something approaching rational thought, I pushed off from the wall and turned back toward the ship. The ship, I told myself. The longship. An extraordinary artifact of incalculable historical value. That was what I had come here for. That was the thing the inscription had led me to, and the carvings represented context—disturbing, inexplicable, personally catastrophic context, but context—and I was an archaeologist. I needed to think about what I was going to do next.
My grandmother’s pendant felt very warm at my throat.
I wrapped my fingers around it without thinking, the rune pressing into my palm the way it had done at intervals throughout my entire adult life, whenever I was frightened or excited or standing at the edge of something I couldn’t see the bottom of.
I looked at the ship. I looked at the inscription I hadn’t yet examined above the prow. I looked at the carved serpent head with its open mouth facing the sealed stone entrance.
And then, because I was apparently constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone, I looked back at the carvings.
The device. The frame. The women bound to it with their faces transformed by something I kept refusing to name.
At twenty-four years old I already had two journal publications and a dissertation in progress. I had a rune pendant that had sometimes gotten warm against my skin since my grandmother had willed it to me, when I was seventeen years old, and I had just discovered a secret Viking sanctuary hidden in a Sicilian cliff. I was standing there alone, and no one in the world knew where I was.
Maybe I should have found that last fact alarming, but in truth I found it exciting. Maybe that should have alarmed me even more, because the kind of excitement I felt didn’t come, as I told myself it did, from the thrill of archaeological discovery. I still had that, in the back of my mind, but the bodily discovery that had begun the moment I saw the carvings—that was what spurred me on now, though I refused to acknowledge it.
The inscription was on the far wall, past the prow, in a band of runes that ran at eye level, so as to be legible presumably to those who occupied the ship. I had noticed it because my torch beam caught the deep shadows of the carved letters at the exact angle required to make them legible, and I thought, of course. Of course there is more text. Of course I am going to read it.
I clambered as gracefully and carefully as I could over the gunwale and onto the ancient ship. It creaked a little beneath me, but I could feel how solid it still was after what must be at least a thousand years.
I walked toward the stern, where the steering oar’s handle rose from its mounting on the rail. I got close enough to read the runes I saw there, Younger Futhark like the ones in the vanished chapel.
Not spelling out Latin, though; I recognized Old Norse words immediately. My Old Norse was functional rather than fluent—sufficient for manuscript work and for the kind of careful philological parsing that doctoral research required. I stood very still while I worked through it, moving my lips slightly the way I did when the language required real effort.
Here in Sicily, the Sons of Odin, far from the cold seas of their people, find solace in taking daughters of the Romans to serve their cocks.
I read it three times. I read it in hope it would change on the next pass.
In this chamber, girls must undergo their first voyage with their masters, and learn to please them well.
The pendant at my throat seemed to pulse with warmth. I pressed my fingertips to the rune carved into its surface and felt the heat travel up through my hand and into my arm. I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and my breathing very deliberate, and then I turned back toward the prow of the ship.
First voyage. Not a real voyage, though. But on a real ship?
I looked at the rowing benches, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Iron rings, set into them in places that couldn’t have anything to do with navigation.
No, the carpenters had set these rings at a spacing perfect for restraining wrists and ankles, when a man laid a woman upon the bench with her face down and her backside up, and he wanted to make sure she stayed there.
[divider]Chapter Three
Ilsa
I told myself I would examine the rowing benches for structural evidence of the construction methods. I knew enough about longship construction that I could probably have noticed details that would give some idea as to its date. The timbers were extraordinary—the degree of preservation seemed almost impossible by any natural standard. I obviously needed to understand the treatment that had been applied, and the benches in particular showed signs of use that I needed to document. That represented my professional reasoning and I committed myself to it as I bent to inspect the benches more closely.
They were very smooth. That was the first thing I noticed when I ran my hand along the nearest one. Not smooth in the way of weathered wood, or in the way of simple age. Smooth in the specific way of surfaces that have been touched, repeatedly, by human bodies. The grain had been worn to a softness that I recognized from handling other artifacts of intimate use: devotional objects like prayer beads and the stalls of monastery chapels. This smoothness constituted a record of bodies’ movements atop the bench.
I looked at the iron fittings I had noticed, set at the bench ends and also in the middle. Small rings, hammered into the wood at intervals that I now understood even more clearly—with a clarity that had arrived like a hot wind—were not for nautical purposes.
And the pattern of wear on the bench, to my dismay, echoed the placement of those fittings. These benches had not been sat upon, moved upon, by the mighty glutes of Viking warriors as they rowed their way through rough seas back from their raids to their coastal villages.
I put both hands flat on the bench, moved them along the symmetrical wear marks that looked not like a warrior’s strong backside but like a young woman’s midriff.
The movement hadn’t been along the axis of the vessel but perpendicular to it.
The wood grew warm under my palms more quickly than I thought it should. The warmth moved up through my hands the same way the pendant’s heat moved through my fingers when I clasped it, and I heard myself make a sound that I would not willingly have made in company.
I was not in any company. I kept returning to that fact. I was entirely alone in a sealed limestone cavern beneath a Sicilian cliff, and no one in the world knew where I was. The inscription had said first voyage, and the benches were smooth with the memory of bodies, and my body was…
I sat down on the bench. That seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I had been on my feet for hours.
I sat down and the warmth of the wood seemed to come through the thin canvas of my cargo shorts immediately. I put my hands in my lap, and I looked at the carved walls of the cavern from this new vantage point: the longship scenes, the women on the rowing benches, their faces turned up or pressed down or simply opened on their new masters’ huge cocks, their expressions in the careful rendering of the long-dead artist showing the same thing I had refused to acknowledge for the last hour.
I named it now, as clinically as I could, sitting on the bench with the warm wood underneath me. I knew that expression. I felt that expression, happening to my own face, in the privacy of a sealed cavern where thank God no one would ever see it.
Arousal.
My hand moved. I watched it move the way you watch something happen that you’ve decided not to stop.
The waistband of my shorts. The elastic of my underwear. And then—
Oh.
Oh, I was—
I had known, in an abstract and deeply suppressed way, that I had gotten warm down there. I had known it since the village scenes, since the table, since the woman between the two men whose carving I had moved the torch away from fastest. I had known it, managed it, and maintained a running academic commentary in my head that had functioned as a kind of insulation.
The insulation had disappeared. My fingers had found the truth of my body. That truth was urgent and specific and very difficult to reframe as scholarship.
I lay back on the bench. The wood was warm along the full length of my spine, and the iron ring was cold against the back of my wrist where I accidentally touched it. I looked up at the ceiling of the cavern lost in darkness above me, I let my knees fall open, and I stopped pretending.
The vision came slowly at first, the way the mosaic had emerged from the earth, a detail at a time. First, a deep forest. A root descending into dark water. A branch moving in a wind I couldn’t feel. Then… I was on a longship—not this one, not a preserved and landlocked relic, but a moving ship on a cold gray sea. There was a man looming over me, his huge body framed against the sky. He stood there, looking down at me with the unhurried certainty of someone who had all the time in the world and no intention of wasting a moment of it.
He was naked. His enormous cock jutted from his lap in wordless threat. Of course it was enormous. The carvings had established this as a categorical feature of these men, and my imagination, apparently, had taken thorough notes.
His hands were on my hips. His voice was in a language I shouldn’t have been able to understand and understood perfectly.
Be still, he said, or something that meant that. The sea will take us home. You will learn.
I had never… I was a virgin… I had never had a man’s hands on my hips in that specific configuration of hungry intent. The fact that these hands existed only in my own mind made them no less vivid and no less effective.
He turned me over. In the real world—if this fantastic cavern could be called that—I turned myself over. I realized that my unconscious mind had figured out the way the iron fittings worked and transferred the understanding to my fantasy. Two rings to secure a girl’s wrists… two to secure her knees, face down and bottom up, at the end of the bench, so a warrior could…
I felt the blunt pressure of him against me, from behind, mounting me like a stallion… finding me, the impossible size of him pressing at the entrance to my desperate pussy. My back—my actual back, on the actual bench, in the actual cavern—arched, pushing my bottom upward.
A girl restrained on the bench wouldn’t have been able to touch herself, but I could. I thrust my right hand down inside my shorts, inside my panties, and I made it real. I pushed two fingers inside, up against the barrier of my virginity. I whimpered at the heat and the wetness I found. My fingers moved faster and faster as in my mind’s eye my new master took what belonged to him.
The pendant felt hot against my breastbone, confined by my tee shirt and moving slightly with the obscene bucking of my hips against my hand, over the ancient rowing bench where, surely, dozens of medieval girls had met their maidenhood’s end.
The rune-carved disc pressed against my sternum, feeling almost like a brand.
I gasped and my eyes flew open. The cavern… the ship… the rowing bench opposite mine… they all swam back into focus and the vision…
The tree. Yggdrasil. Not the mosaic version, not the carved limestone version, but something vast and real and absolutely indifferent to me, its roots going down into places that had no names, its branches touching worlds I had no framework for. The shape of it, massive, somehow overlaid atop my sight of the cavern’s dimness, the sound of the ancient wood creaking under me.
I snatched my hand out of my shorts and rolled off the bench onto the deck of the ship.
My heart was slamming against my ribs. I gripped the bench edge with both hands and breathed and waited for the tree to recede. Slowly, it did, though to my dismay it seemed to remain in my vision, too, like the outline of an after-image.
The cavern came back more fully, though. The ship. The torch I had set on the bow thwart, still lit. The iron rings. The smooth wood.
I stood up, pulling myself upright with the help of the bench, warm now with my body’s embarrassing heat. My legs felt unreliable.
I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology and I had just almost masturbated myself to orgasm on a Viking longship in a secret sanctuary.
I picked up my torch and I walked further into the cavern. I understood, without examining the understanding too closely, that I had no intention of moving toward the entrance, though I also understood that that’s where I should have been headed. The inscription had said this chamber as though there were others.
I found the narrow passage at the back of the cavern. It had a carving above its lintel; the same interlocking knotwork I had seen in the mosaic and then, in much greater profusion, around the obscene images on the cavern wall next to the longship.
I went through the doorway.
The passage beyond was not natural limestone. Someone had worked it, extended it, lined the walls with the same deep-relief carving that covered the main cavern, though here the scenes were different: processional rather than narrative, figures moving in sequence toward something at the far end. The torch threw long shadows that made the carved figures seem to walk beside me.
Chambers opened on either side. Alcoves, really, each with a heavy timber door that stood open, and each containing…
I stopped at the third one, once my mind had processed the structure that occupied a prominent position at the center of each chamber.
I had been looking at its shape on the cavern walls for the last hour: the curved wood, the padding, the horizontal bar for a girl to hold onto as her Viking master enjoyed her. The ergonomic design that I had understood intellectually and now began to understand in a different register entirely, because here it was not a carving.
Here was the object—the device—itself. Here it was a real thing made of real wood, real leather, and real iron fittings, standing in the illumination of my torch with the same remarkable preservation as the ship, waiting patiently for an occupant, through long centuries of absence.
A… a bride saddle, something in my mind supplied, from some obscure corner of my Norse material culture reading. I must have read a description, at some point. My cheeks filled with heat. I had read a description in a questionable work of nineteenth-century scholarship, and then I had promptly repressed the knowledge. That was what I had been looking at in the homecoming scenes, the women bound to it with their bottoms thrust backward past the edge of the saddle to receive their masters in their…
Røvhul. The Danish word I wished I didn’t know, but the word I couldn’t keep myself from imagining these Norman warriors—Danish in ancestry—using as they approached the ‘brides’ they’d won with their iron-tipped spears and meant to enjoy with their fleshly ones.
I saw it, in my mind’s eye: the huge, naked man towering over the naked young woman, commanding her to mount the strange, frightening device.
“You’ll ride my saddle and take me in your røvhul now, girl.”
She mounted, trembling with fear. His broad hands helped her, fondled her, roused her.
“That’s it,” he growled, his manhood hardening as he touched and watched. “Ride now… move your hips and rub your little fisse back and forth on the leather… get yourself ready to take the tool in that sweet hole…”
I stepped back from the doorway. My shoulder hit the passage wall.
Then, as if drawn by an enchantment, my feet moved the other way, into the chamber, toward the bride saddle.
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